Rolle Bolle (the game, not the beer)...

Thursday, May 16, 2013

Alright, by now you know we're selling a new summer seasonal, and it's called Rolle Bolle (and it's delicious). But the question of "what the hell is a Rolle Bolle? (pronounced Roll-ee Bowl-ee)) keeps coming up. But ask no more because I am here to explain it...

Rolle Bolle is a game, played in Belgium (and other places to, like Ghent, Minnesota!). The game is a bit like Bocce Ball, but instaed of rolling balls, you roll big discs. These discs look a lot like wheels of cheese. It's pretty awesome. The player rolls these wheels towards targets, like a stake in the ground, or a painted circle. The closest wins points. We have two courts at the brewery, you should come by and play.

And to help in Rolle Bolle (beer and game) PR we had some totally awesome, custom Rolle Bolle sets made to giveaway (we'll get to that in a minute). The sets were made by Tyler Morris Woodworking here in Fort Collins. The fellows at TMWW did extreme amounts of research and it shows. Rolle Bolle wheels are not quite even, side to side, so they roll in an arc. And this arc adds one more dynamic you have to play during the game. Meaning you can't roll it in a straight line to get to the stake. Ideally you would want the arc to be the same on all the Rolle Bolles in the set and this is where all the research from TMWW paid off. All of them had to be hand cut from European Beech into blocks. Then cut from blocks into rough wheels, then lathed to the right shape. Then each Rolle Bolle had to pass the roll test. If they didn't pass they went back to the lathe for correction.

I got to go to their shop and see some sets get made, here's a quick video:

Pretty awesome, right? These fellows hand-lathed 127 sets of eight. That's 1,016 total bolles. At roughly 5 minutes on the lathe each (and that's not counting the all the work to get to this step) equals 5,080 minutes of lathe work. Seriously, lots of work, but they came out awesome. A big, huge THANK YOU is in order for those guys, they do great work.